Tag Archives: Healthcare

Abstract — Establishment medicine is sustained by a triad of core deceptions: (1) An apical lie by omission which does not admit that the predominant causal determinant of an individual’s health is the individual’s real and perceived place in the society’s dominance hierarchy, (2) the “voodoo lie” of the false scientific foundation of its professional practice which does not admit that most of medical research used to justify the recommended “treatments” is wrong and that consequently the “treatments” are ineffective at best, and (3) the dirty secret that establishment medicine (in North America) is itself the third leading cause of death, after cancer and cardiovascular failures for which medicine is of little use. All three core deceptions have been decisively exposed by leading-edge mainstream researchers whose works have had virtually no impact in reforming the profession.

As a child who grew up in one of the many flavors of household, “dysfunction,” I can report emphatically that children always believe their parents are worth suffering for, over, about and instead of. And, sadly, Amy Jade Winehouse was, probably unbeknownst to her, a victim of this particular scourge of western civilization, the cliché of the “dysfunctional family.”

The U.S. health care system has become one gigantic money making scam, and you are about to see the statistics that prove it. Today, the United States spends more on health care per person than any other country in the world by far. The health insurance companies and the big pharmaceutical corporations are raking in gigantic mountains of cash and yet the quality of the health care that we receive in return is rather quite poor. People living in Puerto Rico have a greater life expectancy than we do.

Hundreds of marchers are peacefully re-enacting the historic March on Blair Mountain this week in a nonviolent celebration to remind the nation that the safety and health of coal miners and coal mining communities must be placed above the profit interests of union-busting absentee coal companies.

If the safety, health and civil rights of all Americans are protected by the same laws, then our nation’s President and lawmakers are obliged by the staggering health and human rights crises and mounting deathtoll in the central Appalachian coalfields to call for an immediate moratorium on all mountaintop removal operations.

This is a political crime of deception, an enormous bait and switch, in which liberals and quite a few independents were misled by a serial liar who purposely characterized himself as a reformer…

Did you receive your email from Barack Obama yet? If you are a Democrat, or on his campaign mailing list, the president has promised you are going to be the first to know when he formally launches his reelection campaign. It could be any moment now; apparently the White House is waiting for a slow news day when Libya and Fukushima and Congressional budget negotiations aren’t dominating the media agenda. Once the news is out, you are expected as a loyal Obama supporter to start sending in campaign donations and begin attending campaign organization meetings.

The problem is, if you are a liberal, the chances are pretty high that you haven’t forgotten that the White House thinks of you as “fucking retarded”.

Libertarians know and hate the Federal Reserve. They hate Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan. But they are not willing to go to the poor people who are being forced to pay for the crimes of those people that they hate because it’s a union or because there may be some Democrats involved in it. Libertarians and progressives can find common ground, but at this point still they are refusing to step back and concede a little bit to find it. They have to come together on campaign finance and lobbying and most importantly they can come together on breaking up the banks.

A decision by a federal court in Florida sent shock waves through the Obama administration on Monday. Judge Roger Vinson ruled the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it is commonly known, unconstitutional, in a consolidated lawsuit that involved 26 states challenging the law.

Gabrielle Giffords was not just the victim of the political invective present in the former United States of America; she was also the victim of a morally, ethically and economically bankrupt healthcare system.

Jared Loughner was a severely mentally ill individual, probably in a state of psychosis when he penned his salad of words for all to see on YouTube.

I have experience with this sort of mental illness. Not that I couldn’t be wrong, confusing my family member’s mental illness as hammer in a world of unwitting nails, but to suggest that when Ronald Wilson Reagan opened up the wards of the mentally ill and emptied their contents onto American society in 1981, I foresaw this sort of tragedy befalling all of us. Continue reading →

A look at our empire in decline through the eyes of the European media, including thoughts on healthcare, prisons, joblessness, unemployment benefits, and the lost social safety net.

As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective.

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less — right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical — the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

The residents of Waterloo, Ontario in Canada have voted to stop adding fluoride to their water supply. The decision has been welcomed by anti-fluoride campaigners.

The incoming head of the Ontario Dental Association, Dr. Harry Hoediono, has condemned the decision, claiming that people are unaware of the dental health benefits of fluoride. Campaigners against fluoride believe that adding the chemical to the water supply can cause health problems including cancer, thyroid disease and arthritis.

Over the past several decades, no matter which political party has been in power the government has continued to become a larger part of our lives. These days many people are speaking of the “nanny state” that we have created, but the reality is far worse than that. The truth is that the government has become a gluttonous, out of control behemoth that is gobbling up everything in sight and that is attempting to exert full spectrum dominance over our lives. Today, the government seems to have an insatiable hunger to watch us, track us and control us. Now they even want to feel our private parts before we get on an airplane. No matter what politicians we send to Washington D.C., it just seems to get worse and worse. Anyone who still believes that we live in “the land of the free” is completely and totally delusional.

Replacing our dysfunctional patchwork of private health insurers with a single, streamlined system of financing, would save about $400 billion annually in unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy. That’s enough to cover all of those now uninsured and to provide every person in the United States with quality, comprehensive coverage, writes Abrons.

“[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”
– Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

The maintenance of the hierarchical structures that control our lives depends on Pinter’s “vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed.” Therefore the main institutions that embed us into the hierarchy, such as schools, universities, and mass media and entertainment corporations, have a primary function to create and maintain this tapestry. This includes establishment scientists and all service intellectuals in charge of “interpreting” reality.

Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries — Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

DURING THE three years I’ve been in treatment at Barts for multiple myeloma, I’ve given thanks many times to Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and the people who built and sustain it. Since I grew up in the United States and still have close friends and family there, I’m acutely aware of how different things might have been.

Contracting a serious illness anywhere is occasion for anxiety and uncertainty. But in the U.S., anxiety and uncertainty are multiplied many times over. People who only know the NHS may not realize what they’re being spared.

There are real fights and there are fake fights, engineered to distract attention away from the real deal. The shouting match between Obama’s Dems and the Tea party Repubs is one of those fake fights. The health care legislation passed by the Obama Democrats is incomparably worse than anything they could have passed right after the presidential election, and significantly worse than anything Democrats could have passed at midyear 2009. The president and his minions have delayed as long as possible to guarantee the worst, not the best bill for patients, and the best deal possible for Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Medicine.